7 Wilfrid Sellars Meets Cambridge Pragmatism* Huw Price 1. Introduction In this piece I want to connect Sellars with some philosophers I have taken to calling Cambridge Pragmatists. I shall note some similarities, argue that each side has something to learn from the other, and propose that there’s a common lesson, very close to the surface in Sellars, that both sides should embrace explicitly. Who are these Cambridge Pragmatists?1 One of the most prominent is Simon Blackburn, and my use of the term goes back to 2011, the year I arrived in Cambridge as Blackburn’s successor. There was an opportunity to apply for conference funding from a new university scheme. With Fraser MacBride, I came up with a proposal that seemed not only an excellent fit with our own interests, but astonishingly inclusive within recent Cambridge philosophy more generally. From my side, it connected my work not only to Blackburn (that link was obvious) and to several of our apparently dis- parate predecessors in the same chair, such as D. H. Mellor, Anscombe, von Wright, and Wittgenstein, but also to many other distinguished Cambridge philosophers of the past century or so—Frank Ramsey, Bernard Williams, and Edward Craig, for example. This appealingly broad church was the view that for some interesting topics, the path to philosophical illumination lies not, as other philosophers have thought, in an enquiry into the (apparent) subject matter of the dis- course in question, but in asking about the distinctive role of the concepts involved—how we come to have such concepts, what roles they play in our lives, and so on. A view of this sort is very familiar in Blackburn’s work on topics such as morality and modality, for example—Blackburn now calls the approach ‘expressivism’ and traces it in both these cases to Hume. But it also turns up, in places, in the work of a very wide range of other Cam- bridge philosophers. At least arguably, for example, we find it in the work of Mellor on tense, Anscombe on the first person, Craig on knowledge, von Wright on causation, Williams on truth, as well as Wittgenstein and Ramsey, famously, on various matters. 15032-0201-FullBook.indd 123 9/30/2016 8:01:40 PM 124 Huw Price The view in question seems appropriately called a kind of pragmatism. It claims to understand the concepts in question in terms of their use—their practical role in our lives—rather than in terms of any ‘corresponding’ meta- physics. So, a little cheekily, MacBride and I labelled our project ‘Cambridge Pragmatism’. As we were well aware, the cheek was triple-barrelled. One could find such views outside Cambridge. Many of the Cambridge philoso- phers on our list would not have regarded themselves as pragmatists. And there were famous pragmatists—not necessarily in quite the same sense— associated with another Cambridge! But despite or perhaps because of these blemishes, the label served our purposes very well. We organised a highly suc- cessful conference at the end of May 2012. It was held in the Winstanley Lec- ture Theatre at Trinity College, a few steps from Wittgenstein’s remote rooms. For me an additional advantage of the label Cambridge Pragmatism was that it made it easy to raise a question that had interested me for a num- ber of years, that of the relation between the self-avowed expressivism of Humeans such as Blackburn, on the one hand, and Robert Brandom, on the other. Blackburn and Brandom seemed to mean different things by the ‘expressivism’ (Brandom taking his inspiration from Hegel, not Hume). Yet there seemed to be obvious connections, even if very little dialogue. More- over, Brandom linked his own expressivism to pragmatism, while Blackburn certainly counted as a Cambridge Pragmatist, in my sense. So, with Bran- dom himself present, our conference was able to enquire into the relation- ship between Cambridge Pragmatism and modern American pragmatism (as it descends from the original pragmatism of the faux Cambridge, so to speak). From this starting point, Brandom’s own interest in Sellars provides one natural link to the question of the relationship between Sellars and Cam- bridge Pragmatism. Here I’ll exploit a different connection, something more like a common cause. We can link Sellars and Cambridge Pragmatists under the banner of Humean expressivism, in Blackburn’s sense. I’ll begin there, highlighting some similarities between Sellars on the one hand, and Ramsey and Blackburn on the other. I shall also say something about the general shape of Humean expressivism, emphasising two things: first, its deflation- ary consequences for metaphysics, and second, a particular kind of problem it faces—‘creeping cognitivism’, as I shall call it, adapting a label due to Jamie Dreier (2004). I shall then describe Sellars’ attempts to wrestle with creeping cognitivism— not under that name, but I hope it will be clear that it is the same problem. I shall identify what I take to be Sellars’ solution, and propose that it is one that Cambridge Pragmatists need as well. However, the consequences are more far-reaching than Sellars or most of the Cambridge Pragmatists have realized, I think—it requires a more thoroughgoing expressivism, in a sense I’ll explain. Finally, I’ll raise the question whether Sellars is ready for the deflationary metaphysical consequences of this Cambridge way of developing Humean expressivism. 15032-0201-FullBook.indd 124 9/30/2016 8:01:40 PM Sellars Meets Cambridge Pragmatism 125 As I said, my conclusion will be that there are lessons to be learnt in both directions. Sellars has something important to offer to Cambridge Pragma- tists in response to creeping cognitivism. But they in turn have something to offer Sellars, in their clarity about the fact that the view offers an alternative to metaphysics. And there’s a common lesson, close to the surface but not explicit in Sellars, that both sides do well to take on board. 2. Sellars and Ramsey Let’s begin with some familiar quotations from Sellars’ ‘Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and Causal Modalities’ (CDCM): We have learned the hard way that the core truth of ‘emotivism’ is not only compatible with, but absurd without, ungrudging recognition of the fact, so properly stressed (if mis-assimilated to the model of describ- ing) by ‘ethical rationalists’, that ethical discourse as ethical discourse is a mode of rational discourse. It is my purpose to argue that the core truth of Hume’s philosophy of causation is not only compatible with, but absurd without, ungrudging recognition of those features of causal discourse as a mode of rational discourse on which the ‘metaphysical rationalists’ laid such stress but also mis-assimilated to describing. (CDCM, §82) Thus Sellars thinks that in both the ethical and causal (or modal) cases, Hume got something right. He got right what the emotivists picked up in the ethical case—the fact that, in some sense, neither ethical nor causal dis- course is in the business of ‘describing the world’. What Hume got wrong, in both cases, was thinking that this put these topics outside the realm of cognitive or rational discourse. As we shall see, Sellars anticipates Blackburn on these points. However, I think that he himself is anticipated by the first and most brilliant of the Cambridge Pragmatists, Frank Ramsey. This is clearest in Ramsey’s ‘Gen- eral Propositions and Causality’ (Ramsey 1929, hereafter ‘GPC’), writ- ten in September 1929, only four months before Ramsey’s tragically early death. GPC begins with a discussion of the logical status of unrestricted generalizations—claims of the form ‘(x)ĭ(x)’. Ramsey argues against his own earlier view that a sentence of this form should be treated as an infi- nite conjunction. However, as he puts it, “if it isn’t a conjunction, it isn’t a proposition at all” (GPC, 134). In other words, Ramsey’s claim is that these unrestricted generalizations— variable hypotheticals, as he calls them—are not propositional. They are doing some other kind of linguistic job. What job? As Ramsey puts it: “Vari- able hypotheticals are not judgments, but rules for judging: If I meet a ĭ, I shall judge it as a Ȍ” (GPC, 137). Ramsey takes this to be the key to 15032-0201-FullBook.indd 125 9/30/2016 8:01:41 PM 126 Huw Price understanding causal thinking, too—it, too, goes into the non-propositional box. However, Ramsey spots an important difficulty for a view of this kind. If variable hypotheticals are “not judgments but rules for judging”, why do we disagree about them—why do we say “yes or no to them”, as Ramsey puts it? As he says, “The question arises, in what way [a rule for judging] can be right or wrong?” (GPC, 134). Ramsey meets this challenge head-on, discussing various senses in which we can disagree with a claim of this general form. And he insists that we shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that we can disagree about something that isn’t a proposition. On the contrary, he claims: “Many sentences express cognitive attitudes without being propositions, and the difference between saying yes or no to them is not the difference between saying yes or no to a proposition” (GPC, 137, my emphasis.) I hope that the similarity to Sellars is clear here. Sellars uses the term ‘describing’ where Ramsey uses ‘proposition’, but it is clear that they agree on two key points. First, the boundaries of the propositional (Ramsey) or descriptive (Sellars) are not where we naively take them to be—causal claims (and at least for Sellars, ethical claims) lie beyond those boundaries.